The use of wireless communication devices, such as a Blackberry device, a J2ME device or any windows mobile device, has increased dramatically during recent years. The use of such devices allows a person to access their email anywhere as long as they are within proximity of an antennae in communication with the wireless host service for which the wireless communication device is configured. Since the use of these devices has increased dramatically, providers must make accommodations to have these wireless devices provisioned, which includes configuring the wireless device to communicate with the wireless host service. A large company that provides such devices to their employees must typically maintain an information technology (IT) department to manually provision each of their employees devices. Such a process dramatically increases the cost of using the devices since an IT department may need several employees to assist in manually configuring the devices.
To overcome the added expense in manually provisioning wireless communication devices, systems and methods for self provisioning these devices have been developed. Once such system for self provisioning a wireless communication device includes an Internet interface through which a user can access an interface of the wireless host server to provision their own device. This system also includes an authorization program to authorize that a particular user has the authorization to provision a wireless communication device with the wireless host server. A user that has the authorization to provision the device can then provision their wireless communication device to remotely send and receive email from a specific email exchange through the wireless host service. One drawback of this prior art system is that a user can only provision the wireless communication device with one wireless host service. Thus, this system does not provide any flexibility to the user or a company in choosing the services that the system can provide for the wireless communication device. Another drawback of this prior art system is that it cannot perform auxiliary services such as creating user email accounts or installing other software on a user's wireless communication device.
Other problems may result from the manual provisioning and self provisioning of wireless communication devices, especially if a company uses these methods to provision a large number of devices to communicate through several wireless host services. With prior systems, each wireless host server may have to communicate with every email or messaging server that the company maintains, which can greatly reduce the amount of email that a system can process. Moreover, the more complicated the system, the more resources a company will have to devote in managing the wireless host servers and email servers.